on writing a while loop for rolling two dice

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 16:32:45 -0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> declaimed the following:

>On 2021-09-08, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> I spent close to 20 years (80s-90s) maintaining the /output/ of such
>> a preprocessor.
>
>Ouch. I hope it paid well. ;)

	Only if one ignores the bloody cost of apartments (given the rent paid
over the 30 years I spent in that 1BR 680sq.ft. unit I should have owned
it, if not half the facility <G>)
>
>> The software had apparently originated with a sub-contractor, and we
>> did not have access to their preprocessor
>
>Allowing that to happen is definitely a major management F*%k-up for
>which somebody should have had their career ended.
>
	For all I know, someone might have... Back when the application was
running on PDP-11 (I joined the program early 80s, when the "mission
planning" software was being ported to the VAX-11).

	Most of the "mission planning" software was local-grown, so was DEC
FORTRAN (may have started as F-IV, and developed F77 during maintenance and
the porting to the VAX). Not the part I maintained -- which drove a Ramtek
9300 graphics engine (only one engine could be installed into a VAX, it was
that archaic). It got to the point where I think Ramtek service was
recycling the parts when ever we had a service call. Eventually I proposed
that a VAXstation (DECWindows) and GKS could replace most of the display
side. We weren't approved to rewrite the application to directly display --
but rewriting the Ramtek library to send the plotting data to a separate
program, which managed the display window, was in the budget.

>
>I would have though that would have been pretty trivial compared to
>maintaining the output source for 20 years.

	I'm not so sure -- that "one file per executable" would have led to
long compile times (first for the preprocessor, then for the generated F-IV
output), vs my rewrites into multiple files, where only isolated changes
needed to be recompiled.

	Humorously, the graphics application suite was known as "MESS" (I can't
go deeper into the acronym without violating security classification).


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed at ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/